


High Places

by RefugeRen



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Fake Character Death, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-24 08:30:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19719994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RefugeRen/pseuds/RefugeRen
Summary: (AU) Jungwoo is the heir to a sizeable fortune, and is beholden to his family's reputation. When he falls for Jaehyun, a company employee, can they create the mystery that allows them escape at last?





	High Places

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments, kudos and the like are always appreciated. Keeps the old writer brain churning. I'm very new around the fandom, so I hope that I've created something enjoyable.

Being born the heir to a massive fortune was not unlike living under an unlucky sign. 

Jungwoo's father secured the largest hangar for private planes in the area and hired the foremost technicians for their repair. Everything top of the line, done yesterday. His family made headlines, were a tourist boon, and personally funded life flight transportation for those unable to pay. Their house was an architectural marvel, replete with its own dock and a man-made lake beyond it. They'd inherited the house from his deceased grandparents.

Some said that the timing was more than a bit curious. 

Jungwoo's parents had been dirt-poor, and they moved into the impressive digs not too long after their only child was born. His father was a hobbyist of all kinds and a master of none, then. He'd settled on airplane repair after a small prop plane had to make an emergency landing in their backyard. According to family legend, toddler Jungwoo threw himself to the ground and squalled, terrified of the engine noise.

Jungwoo was educated in the best schools, but was no good with his hands. This gravely disappointed his father, who'd planned to have him down in the mechanic nitty-gritty, his privileged son dues paid in full before he was promoted to manager. And he wasn't nearly the domineering cretin with clout that Daddy Dearest required to manage his crews.

Jungwoo was thoughtful and indecisive, was never picked first for sports and had few friends. He socialized exclusively with the children of his family's servants, and even took his maid's daughter to his senior prom.

She told him she loved him that night. 

He drank a good amount of spiked punch and told her that he didn't think he could love a girl. That he never would and, more heartbreakingly, that he never had. That her dress was color of infant diarrhea and he was going to vomit if she didn't cover the offensive sight with his suit jacket, that minute.

For a year after that, Jungwoo's mother thought he was simply struggling to get past the perils of puppy love.

He graduated. He began sneaking out of the house. Security cameras caught him and nervous hands were wrung. "I drive at night, when I can't sleep," he told them. They sent him to doctors who offered him the strong sedatives that he sold at clubs. For the amount they paid, his parents considered the problem fixed. They installed him in a managerial position at the hangar. He was organized and great with deadlines, and his employees were grateful for his understanding ear. He treated them to beers after hours and became a fairly good pool player. Productivity surged.

One night he came home with kohl-smudged eyes and the ghost of lipstick on his mouth. The light from the stairwell flooded the foyer. He slid against the wall and caught himself on a small table that nearly toppled with his weight. "Mom, I have something to say...to tell...talk..say," he tried drunkenly, the tears thick in his voice.

"Oh, honey," his mother called down from the top of the stairs, pulling her robe tighter. "You already have." The flash of her bejeweled fingers met the silk's sheen and sparkled cruelly. She turned and fled for the master bedroom. He heard the door slam. He heard her crying and waking his father.

But no one said a word about it to Jungwoo after that. It was the last time his mother looked him in the eye.

"If this was a Southern gothic novel, I'd be banished to the attic," Jungwoo noted, laughing. The evening sunlight skipped the lake, erupting with each kick Jungwoo gave beneath the inner tube that cradled him.

"When your parents' angry God floods the world again, it's probably better to be on higher ground," Jaehyun countered from the dock, his feet submerged in the water. He reached out both arms to reel Jungwoo to dry land.

"Good thing we have to go two by two." Jungwoo laughed in return. Pale pastels lit his blonde hair, the remnants of temp dye threaded by sunshine. He grabbed at Jaehyun’s wrists, ducking forward fiercely with his feet pressed against the pier's pillars. He dragged Jaehyun into the water, the green murk muting his yelp of protest. The lake's surface foamed with his steady swim strokes, his face aggressively set upon revenge. 

"Don't kill me!" Jungwoo capitulated when Jaehyun sidled tube-side. "I'm scared!" 

The heft of Jaehyun's muscled forearms caused the rubber to list dangerously left. Light dappled Jaehyun's profile, his lips parted to negotiate some truce, cool where Jungwoo met them with his own. His tongue mapped the familiar contours of Jaehyun's mouth, detoured coyly where Jaehyun chased.

"I wish I could have a different life," Jungwoo breathed when the contact broke, as if bolstered by shared breath. 

"Who says you can't?" Jaehyun replied.

They both looked toward the four-story manse. The dark windows and the high, gabled attic.

They'll never put me anywhere. As long as I'm here, Jaehyun supposed inwardly, they'll never take him.

And so they began to whisper.

///

Jaehyun was the one who first taught him pool.

Jaehyun was on the maintenance floor in the sweltering heat. For hours a day he handled the small, oiled, broken parts of big engines and made them run like new. He watched Jungwoo assess all the employees suggestions (including his own). He listened to Jungwoo ask about their families and their hardships.

He once asked Jaehyun if he had a girlfriend. He seemed to like hearing no. 

Daily, Jungwoo fielded aggrieved calls from clients demanding the cheapest fix and immediate answers. And his limit was narrower than most. 

Jaehyun once caught him in a shouting match that left him pelting his phone hard against a file cabinet, breathless and red-faced.

"Might be a good idea to get some air," Jaehyun suggested, peeking past his superior's doorway surreptitiously. The door stood open, Jungwoo's tirade listenable for all of those beyond it.

Jungwoo coughed, standing, and moved past Jaehyun with a humiliated air. He thundered down the steel steps of the second floor catwalk, pressing quickly past the nosy onlookers below. His strides led him from the warehouse, and he stamped dusty prints to the solitary airstrip beyond the building's parking lot. The August heat smudged its width. He crossed his arms, his spine shuddering with each grounding breath he exhaled. 

"Whatever that was, I'm sure it wasn't that bad," Jaehyun emphasized. His work boots caught the asphalt divide with a pebbled crunch, a step behind.

"Totally undermined my fucking authority up there," Jungwoo seethed retroactively. He lifted a hand, raking back his hair in the stifling heat. 

"You're not exactly the kind of person who has limited reserves of the stuff." Jaehyun reminded him, snorting.

"You have no idea what kind of person I am."

"I'm interested in finding out," Jaehyun had asserted simply. 

Jungwoo smiled.

///

The news remarked that it had been an exceedingly normal day. Jungwoo, however, had not shown up to work. Jaehyun, who did, feigned the same panic that rose fast among his coworkers. 

Reported by headlines to live a high risk lifestyle, Jungwoo's former drug connections came out in droves, giving their anonymous statements to the local rags. Some went to his parents for hush money, although most of his sales had petered out months before. 

He'd left his cell phone at home. Police had no luck tracking the GPS on his car. Satellite notifications had been disabled by the owner some time prior, claimed the company, who generously provided backlog audio of cancel call.

It had happened shortly after the altercation he'd had with his mother, she knew. Still, she failed to divulge this information to authorities, anticipating further scandal. She cut him out of the family portraits, not for the first time. Jungwoo smiled out at eager searchers in a pressed suit and tie. 

The notes began appearing at local news stations. In Jungwoo's panicked scrawl was etched:

We Are SEVEN.

We are the unseen. We wield a knife which makes no shallow cut.

You have lost something. To find it Whole, comply with our directives: 1.5 million in unmarked bills. In a duffle bag. At your place of business. Interference, police or otherwise, will be met with deadly force.

-We are seven.

He counted on the reach of wealth to exceed its grasp.

"I don't want to involve the police too closely," Jungwoo's father insisted, coughing into his pricey handkerchief. With his progeny missing, the elder rejoined his post upstairs, though he scarcely made it through the workday without falling asleep. "I want you there, with them, with the ransom. We know that you would do anything for our son." He nodded with great difficulty to Jaehyun. "After all...you spent all that time together -”

"In Bible study, yes. I'd do anything for Jungwoo. These last weeks," Jaehyun sighed, truly exhausted. "Have been trying to say the least."

"Sadly," Jungwoo's father replied, standing, "circumstances compel me to ask for anything." He dispensed a small key from the pocket of his dated suit. He unspooled a locked file cabinet drawer with a weighty clank. Jaehyun's face, behind him, was practiced and impassive. 

"Please don't judge me for lending this out, son. I wasn't always such a good man." Arthritic fingers popped the hard shell case balanced on his knees. He handed the gleaming revolver over from its foam molding.

"I don't know the first thing about using a gun, sir."

"Well," said the old man, jabbing in the loaded clip noisily. "A capable person can learn almost anything."

Somewhere Jaehyun had a paper cutout riddled with holes.

///

"Why do you need a fake I.D. again? Let alone several?" Jeno inquired, in the dark of the derelict house. Dusty sunlight crept through the bent blinds. The bulbs of bare fixtures were grey and dark overhead.

"Entitlement, mostly. You grow up rich, you like the feeling of money leaving your hands. Can't say that I'll get much of that, in the foreseeable future." Jungwoo nodded to himself as Jaehyun held up each candidate in his or her tiny placard.

"The less you know, the better," Jaehyun said, dispensing bills from a tidy roll, pressing them into Jeno’s hand. "Sorry about the hair." He smiled. "And the houseguest."

Jungwoo shrugged widely, broom in hand, a slump of shorn hair piling at his sneakered feet.

"You love him," Jeno whispered quietly, tucking money in the pocket of his jeans. They appeared to haggle over expenses. Jungwoo, occupied, was none the wiser.

"In my defense, it was hard not to."

"Did you even try?"

///

"I don't mean to intrude," Jaehyun said to the house maid. "I just wanted something to remember him by. And if the abductors make contact I --"

The short, plain woman made a strangled noise of distress at Jaehyun's potential encounter. "You want them to confirm the items are his." She finished, nodding like a seasoned P.I. as she led him up the stairs. The place reeked of polish. It would go up like a match, Jaehyun imagined deliciously.

He also thought that the maid must be selling her story to the papers. Good, he smiled as she revealed the rickety attic stairs to him, the metal unfolding creakily from a ceiling crawl space. Everyone needed to eat, after all.

In a shoebox was a Bible, hollowed out to squirrel away drug money and the expensive jewelry his mother hadn't worn in ages and therefore wouldn't miss.

"If you don't take it, it goes to Dad's mistress," Jungwoo told him, reciting in perfect imitation: "I wasn't always a good man."

Jaehyun shivered. 

///

They'd placed an ad on Craigslist for someone to drive Jungwoo's car cross-country. He'd driven into the woods on the day he disappeared, and left the vehicle behind the ratty, failed subdivision where Jeno and friends roosted. He changed the plates. 

"A mechanical genius." Jaehyun touted lovingly.

"It took me five tries."

Jungwoo watched as the driver slid into the confines of the car and speed off, unbothered by its abandoned state.

"The man takes his paying errands from a place where people beg for threesomes dressed in Bigfoot costumes. Questions are probably verboten." Jaehyun reminded him.

Jaehyun had the duffle bag and the gun. He had the hangar's security feed trained on him, projecting his grainy image to police reinforcement a few miles up the road. Half of the money was counterfeit, and gave just enough weight to be believable to the abductors, authorities ensured. Jaehyun had hidden the weapon days before.

He sat for hours, watching the window anxiously, bowing in on himself with feigned grief. He hammered the wall with his fist until his knuckles bled. Detectives heard his empty stomach lurch audibly. He was always alone.

The Seven missed their deadline. 

///

No one thought much of it when Jaehyun left town. The memories were too painful, he said. He felt like he'd failed a good family. That his friend was no longer out there, had died. Two years later, Jungwoo's father decreed it so. They held an event in his memory, a balloon release, televised nationwide. A real human interest piece.

After that {Redacted} could no longer look at balloons in local party stores. Jaehyun was allowed to keep the gun. "It's a dangerous world, son," his former boss told him, in lieu of goodbye. They kept it on the bedside table.

They were married on a remote island. It was the second time {Redacted} received a new name, he teased.

They slept, always, on the ground floor.


End file.
